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[crushcard]

Player Info
Name: Sarah
18 or Older?: Yep!
Contact: thelightroyale, or PMs to this journal also work!
Player Type: New

Character Info
Name: Seto Kaiba
Canon: Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Monsters
Canon Point: The end of Yu-Gi-Oh! The Dark Side of Dimensions

Age: 19
History: Manga Canon
Personality:

Listen carefully, Ishizu... Your visions of the future don't scare me! I walk my own road! And I make my own future!

- Yu-Gi-Oh! Duelist, Chapter 119

Everyone knows that Seto Kaiba is a child prodigy, a genius inventor and the youngest CEO of Kaiba Corporation, along with being one of the top three duelists in the world. Fewer people know of his reputation as a ruthless businessman who is willing to do anything in pursuit of his own ambitions, even if his plans may skirt on the edge of barely legal. His plans are usually elaborate, and he approaches most things with strategies that have been developed by an analytical, calculating mind. It’s not easy to get along with Seto Kaiba - at best, he tolerates people, and his respect is difficult to earn. His manner of speech is curt, short and almost rude, the implication that you’re not worth my time lingering heavily in his interactions. He’s logical, rational, and is disinclined to believe in the existence of magic unless there’s no other plausible reaction for it. For all his love of dueling theatrics, flashy entrances and larger-than-life appearances, Seto guards his personal space closely.

It’s not surprising that Seto wants to keep much of his early life under wraps. Seto Kaiba grew up crooked because somebody kept breaking him bit by bit as he went. Growing up under the sheer amount of emotional, physical and psychological abuse subjected to him by Gozaburo Kaiba would have been enough to break anyone. Gozaburo doesn’t realise that he’s not just creating an heir to succeed, but a powerful enemy. Fear and hatred is a powerful motivator, after all, and it’s Gozaburo’s abuse that motivates Seto to orchestrate a hostile takeover of Kaiba Corporation, and even as Gozaburo commits suicide at having lost this “game” with Seto, Seto shows no remorse for it, even calmly remarking his reaffirmation that to lose means death.

At his worst, Seto Kaiba is a power-hungry, prideful and self-absorbed individual whose sense of morality is centred on his own goals and desires - stealing rare cards, making deals with the mafia, inducing rivals to ruin: these are all fair game and perfectly acceptable means to an end according to Seto’s worldview. He’s convinced that his deck and his strategies are unbeatable, overpowering his opponents through sheer strength and attack points and crippling his opponents completely with trap cards intended to destroy any cards that can be used against him. He looks down on what he perceives to be weakness (and by extension, dueling with weak cards), and is always hungry for the sheer satisfaction of crushing his rivals completely. His pride also means that he does not take insults or slights against him lightly. He hates being humiliated. He hunts down rivals for years until he has beaten them fully. He builds an elaborate death theme park as revenge against Dark Yugi for the Experience of Death Penalty Game. He will be the King of Games one day, even if the title now belongs to Yugi Mutou. He organises Battle City for the sheer purposes to amass the God Cards to make his deck the most powerful in existence, and to claim victory over Yugi.

At one point, Seto turns out to be such a scarred and twisted human being who has completely lost his sense of empathy and compassion, leaving only his capacity for cruelty, that the only way to fix him is for Dark Yugi to shatter his mind completely with a Mind Crush in an attempt to destroy the evil, grotesque part of his personality.

It helps, somewhat. After putting his heart and mind back together, when Seto awakens from the coma that was induced by the Mind Crush, there’s not much difference to him on the surface. Seto is still arrogant, self-absorbed and competitive - even though he doesn’t quite believe that losing means death, losing is still an undesirable outcome and his desire to win and be the best is still one of his driving motivators. Everything that he does is still with his best interests and with his own goals in mind - he’s just a little bit more willing to use teamwork instead of working purely on his own, such as working together with Yugi in a tag duel against the Masks of Darkness and Light during Battle City. He isn’t as callous with human life as he was previously, expressing disgust over Marik’s tactics to kill Jonouchi and Yugi and trying to call the duel on the pier off.

Seto does not trust easily, and he doesn’t believe in friendship the way Yugi and his friends do. He isn't exactly good with people, except in how he can use them, and intentionally keeps others at arm's length, not wishing to get close to anyone. Rather, what he values is loyalty - both to himself and Kaiba Corporation. Even when confronted by Anzu at Duelist Kingdom about his lack of friends, Seto has said that he doesn’t need friends. However, Seto recognises Yugi as a formidable rival with dueling skills that are worth his time - and perhaps the closest thing that he has to a friend. On the other hand, Jonouchi Katsuya is an annoying pest who isn’t worth his time, a half-rate duelist who courses by on luck rather than genuine skill. Currently, his loyalties lie with himself, and with Mokuba. His relationship with Mokuba is the one most important relationship that Seto has in his life, and Seto would go to the ends of the earth to protect Mokuba from harm if he was able to. And he tries, taking his role as Mokuba’s caretaker and surrogate parent very seriously, even though Seto was too young and emotionally damaged to raise Mokuba properly. To use a chess metaphor for the Kaiba brothers, Seto Kaiba is the queen, and Mokuba is his king. He may be the most powerful piece on the board, but if the king, Mokuba, is not protected, he loses it all.

That’s not to say that Kaiba is an emotionless bastard, even though he seems to act that way most of the time. The hardened shell and ruthless front that Seto adopts is a perfect floodgate keeping those emotions away, impenetrable enough that no one really knows how deep and powerful his emotions run. He’s a creature of passion and of obsession. His purest reactions are in the heat of a duel, when his emotions run high and he pours everything he has into the game. He’s not the kind of person who makes impulsive decisions on a whim, but it’s undeniable that many of his decisions and his actions are influenced by his mental and emotional state. Seto makes calculated risks, including his not-quite suicide attempt at the castle tower at Duelist Kingdom when he realises that his loss would render him unable to save Mokuba from Pegasus.

Despite that, Seto has a soft spot for most children, especially those who were as unfortunate as he was. Part of the reason why he turned Kaiba Corporation into a gaming corporation from a corporation that used to manufacture weapons was his own deep seated wish that he wants them to have the childhood that he never had. He throws himself into the development of Kaiba Land in America after the Battle City tournament in realisation of this wish. It’s also a crazy work ethic and genius that gets him there. Seto has been known to be so absorbed in his projects and his inventions - Solid Vision, the Duel Boxes, new and improved versions of Duel Disk technologies (the list goes on forever, really, and it’s implied that Kaiba Corporation is involved in most industries in Domino) - that he’s fallen asleep at work before.

Although Seto has a connection with the Blue-Eyes White Dragon, his favourite monster and his most loyal servant, the remnants of his connection to a distant past 3,000 years ago, it’s more accurate to say that Seto Kaiba is more like a phoenix, rising from the ashes of his past and moving forward. Seto Kaiba is a survivor - he has struggled constantly over the years, even with steps in the wrong direction, but he somehow manages to keep moving forward, refusing to let the the guilt of his sins drag him down. Seto started out as a penniless orphan who had been betrayed by everyone who knew him, to being the CEO of an international corporation - he doesn’t believe in destiny, he makes his own future, his past is what drives him forward.

Sample: Kaiba on the TDM!

Monster Choices: Using my freebie to choose dragon for him, because. Kaiba.